


are you tough enough to open up

by theultimateburrito



Series: camp howling ground [4]
Category: Sleepaway (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Brief Self Inflicted Dream Violence, Character Study, Crafter Playbook - Freeform, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Emotional Baggage, Gen, Horror, Summer Camp, Visions, dead naming, grief processing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:27:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26978806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theultimateburrito/pseuds/theultimateburrito
Summary: after penelope's death, sinclair rushes to save the last piece of her that exists.
Relationships: Past Sinclair Sullivan/Jack (Freeform)
Series: camp howling ground [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918555
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5
Collections: Camp Howling Ground (Sleepaway 2020 campaign)





	are you tough enough to open up

**Author's Note:**

> well, we started up act 3 yesterday and whoo boy is it an emotional rollercoaster. there's a game mechanic called "the slumbering beast" that brings dreams into reality and it caused some interesting happenings :3c 
> 
> cw for a character crushing a wooden object in their hands and the splinters piercing their hands.

Without even thinking about why or where, Sinclair’s body carries her to the field at the center of camp. Call it intuition, call it her one certainty. The grass in the field is tall today, but Sinclair doesn’t need to see to the other side to know what’s there. She treads lightly through the grass, toward where the woods hesitantly begin, and stands in front of the tree closest to the field. 

Halfway up the tree there hangs a purple birdhouse. Right where she left it just yesterday. It's grounding, in a way, like a dot at the center of a blank piece of paper. Reaching up above her, she’s careful as she unhooks the loop of string from the nail it rests on.

Sinclair takes the birdhouse into her hands. Penelope made this. She’d pushed against the idea all the way, and still painted it with a perfectionist hand. There’s hardly a visible brushstroke. 

It’s purple. 

Sinclair rubs her thumb along the woodgrain, stained with cheap purple acrylic. It’s not lightfast, it’ll fade soon. It was a last minute buy on the way up to Camp Howling Ground this summer. One of the pups from last year loved purple, and the superstition tingling at the back of Sinclair’s neck told her that if she didn’t pick it up, that camper wouldn't be back to be disappointed at the choice. That was three weeks ago when Sinclair pulled into camp late with craft store bags littering her backseat. Penelope was already waiting, pen tapping at her clipboard, to give her shit about it. Sinclair had rolled her eyes at her, then.

Penelope's favorite color was purple. 

Sinclair's got an ear that’s trained to listen, to pick up on that sort of information and hold on to it. But she didn’t even know what Penelope’s favorite color was until yesterday. Why did she have to know now? What does she do with all of the little pieces of Penelope that linger in her mind now? Feels like having keepsakes littering the floor, pouring out of drawers; there will be no use for them but getting rid of them is… wrong. If not for a thoughtful gift, a kind gesture, then what purpose does it serve except remind her of the thousand instances when she could have asked, could have noticed, could have... 

Sinclair clutches the birdhouse in her hands, holding it close to her chest. Slowly she curls around it, easing herself to the ground. Lowering herself down until she’s fully seated on the grass. It’s shorter here, the grass might even be taller now than when she entered the field. She can only really see the sky above her, if she looked. She isn’t, though. 

The paint will fade anyway, so Sinclair doesn’t have qualms with how much she runs her thumb along it. If she wears away at the finish, it adds to the character. Maybe she’s too gone right now but all it takes is a quick swipe of her thumb and-- 

“Ah, shit...” 

Sinclair takes a quick look at her thumb. It picked up a splinter, that’s for sure, but she can’t see it well. There’s a cloud passing overhead, casting a shadow on the ground all below. For now she squeezes the skin around it, trying to get a better look. 

“ _Oh..._ ” A soft voice murmurs, pitying. “What did you do, Frankie?”

Sinclair jerks her head up to face it. 

Jack is sitting beside her, leaning forward on both hands to get a better look at the sliver. She looks the same as she always has, like Sinclair has always remembered her. Jack reaches out to take Sinclair’s hand in hers with a quiet familiarity. Even the way it makes her feel is the same-- a frantic rush through her chest, a spark. 

It should surprise her that their hands are the same size. That Sinclair’s arms, where there used to be dozens upon dozens of friendship bracelets, are bare now except for one single bracelet that she threw away a decade ago. Hers says “Jack” in bead letters; Jack’s says “Frankie”. She stares at them, side by side, feeling unmoored and unreal. 

“I don’t know,” Sinclair says, her voice as young as she feels. Like a kid again. 

Jack purses her lips. She never believed that first answer, knew better not to. “Come on… if there's something wrong you can tell me.”

For a long time, but not long at all, Sinclair is quiet. She watches the sunlight dance along their hands, over their bracelets. Somewhere in her mind, forward and far from where they sit now, Sinclair feels the sting of tears at the back of her throat. 

“I don’t think I can,” she says, finally. 

“Don't be a baby...” After a moment of consideration, Jack lets go of Sinclair’s hand. She sits back on both of hers to watch the clouds overhead. “It’s okay to cry.”

She nearly feels like she could. 

A cloud rolls over, then, casting a shadow onto the ground that courses over the field. Like a ripple -- a breeze on top of still water. Where Jack was once sitting, Polly is now curled up, weeping into her knees. Sinclair feels older when she looks at her, even though she isn’t really at all. 

“I’m sorry,” Polly says. Always looks pretty, even with her face all red and tear-splotched. “I didn't mean to cry in front of you like this.” 

Sinclair looks down at her shoes, shifting the tips of them toward Polly. “You can talk about it if something is wrong… It’s okay.” 

With a forceful swipe of her hand, Polly wipes at the stream of tears on her face. She sniffs just once, quickly, while she has the breath to. “I just… I don't know what I’m doing. You always seem like you know but…” 

Tears consume her the more she speaks, and Polly buries her face in her knees. She mutters the same thing in different words over and over, hardly discernible. 

“I wish I knew… I wish I knew…” 

The muscles in Polly’s arms are tensed with how tightly she hugs around her knees. Maybe that’s all she needs, is someone to hold her so she doesn’t have to do it herself. This feels like the time for that. Sinclair glances away, watches her shoes. The time passes. 

Another roll of clouds cover the field in shadow, gone as soon as they came. Sinclair looks up then. In the wake of their shade, Polly is gone.

In her place is Hailey.

Hot, angry tears pour down Hailey’s face. Her teeth are bared in spite of herself, seething, as she tries to keep it together. Clutched between her hands is Penelope’s birdhouse, shuddering under the force of her grip. Sinclair can see every single joint in her fingers stretched white as Hailey presses in on it from all sides. It looks so painful that Sinclair winces, opens her mouth to say something but the moment she decides to, the birdhouse shatters in Hailey’s grip. 

Through her hands, splinters piercing through her palms. Through bone. 

It’s all blood and shattered wood and all of the force that’s used to crush the birdhouse pushes all of the air out of Sinclair’s chest, but what she feels is more like

a splinter.

The cloud overhead has rolled away and Sinclair is alone, fingertips pressed around the splinter lodged in her thumb. She can see it clearly now. 

It’s purple.


End file.
